Tuesday Erotica Club

by Lisa Beth Kovetz

  They blew in and out of the little shops that presented T-shirts like priceless museum artifacts. They were looking for a gown that could be pulled off the rack and onto the dance floor without alterations. It would be impossible for most women, but Brooke had the just barely female body all those just barely male designers created for.

  She looked great in everything, but a ruby Lanvin ready-to-wear gown with a daring plunge made her look like both a girl and a goddess. The shopkeeper promised to press it, wrap it, and send it on to Bill’s house. Brooke and her mom continued down the other side of the street, spelunking for the perfect pair of shoes and matching evening bag.

  “Too glittery,” her mom declared when Brooke discovered a gorgeous pair of ruby pumps. “And the satin slingbacks go better with that dress.”

  The shoes Brooke really wanted, plus the Lanvin creation, left her only $20 for the matching bag that cost $625.

  “Get the slingbacks, and I’ll pick up the bag,” her mother offered, pouting a little at the thought that Brooke might pick the glittery pumps in spite of her offer to pay. The scene had played out hundreds of times in Brooke’s teenage years, with her mother holding the power of the credit card over her daughter’s desire to look different from every other white-gloved debutante. Brooke lost the battle so many times that one more pair of slingbacks when she really wanted pumps didn’t seem too terribly important. Still, a little frown of disappointment wriggled over Brooke’s mouth. Before she could give into the slingbacks, Brooke’s mom felt a great rush of pity and guilt for her daughter.

  “What am I saying,” Brooke’s mother suddenly said. “You want the pumps. And glitter is so right now. And I love the bag. And you should have what you want. Come, let’s ring them up quick and we’ll still have time for a coffee. I’ll phone the driver to pick us up at the café and then he’ll drop you at Bill’s when we’re done.”

  The perfect ruby pumps and the matching crystal purse were paid for, wrapped, and deposited in a shopping bag. Brooke and her mother dished their neighbors as they sat around a tiny table and sipped tiny ten-dollar coffees and shared a $6 blueberry scone.

  “Call me and tell me what everyone wore,” her mother sang as Brooke got out of the backseat. She called, “Have a great time” as the car pulled away. Brooke swung her packages across the sidewalk and into the cool, dark lobby of Bill’s Fifth Avenue digs.

  12. The Space Between Two Worlds

  THE GIRLS WERE OUT. The roof was fixed. The old, used condoms that once littered the backyard were dug in under the new landscaping. Hopefully the new owners wouldn’t have a dog. Lux hired Carlos to paint the inside, telling him a friend of a friend from work owned the house and needed a good painter for money under the table. She paid him decently and felt good about it. Then she sold the house.

  The realtor had named a ridiculously large amount of money as the initial asking price. Lux dropped it by $20,000 and the place sold for $60,000 over asking price after only sixteen hours on the market. She turned around and bought a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan that needed serious work.

  “Yeah, hey,” Carlos said on the phone with the baby crying in the background, “it’s me. If, like, you know, those bozos from work ever need ah, you know, someone to lift and shove stuff for them again, call me ok. Under the table, right?”

  “Yeah, different people,” Lux said as she traced her finger up and down the chipped paint in Trevor’s kitchen, “but they got a place in Manhattan that needs a little work and they want to let me, you know, be in charge of it. Decorate and stuff.”

  “You gonna paint the whole place purple?”

  Her realtor instructed her to paint the walls “Irish Linen” which are fancy words that mean beige.

  “You want the job or no?” Lux said in a hurried voice, worried that Trevor might emerge from his shower while she was on the phone with her ex-boyfriend talking real estate and paint.

  “Yeah, yeah. When and where?”

  The kitchen was trashed. Lux ordered new cabinets and Carlos hung them. She saved the old sink and planned to scrub it and have him reset it into the new counter. Carlos had a smooth hand with the plaster and patched up every last one of the holes in the ceiling and walls in just one day. They rolled up the carpet and found bugs and a hardwood floor. Carlos had a buddy who worked for a guy who had a sander, and the buddy wasn’t opposed to borrowing the sander and the varnish and coming in and redoing the floors on a Sunday for an allcash price. Carlos worked like a dog with Lux coming in on the weekends to sweat it out with him.

  “No, no, see, last week my mom was sick,” she told Trevor. “This weekend my girlfriend from high school’s got it and I’m watching her baby so she can, you know, rest.”

  It took six weeks for the flu to make its way through all of Lux’s old friends and family. On the last weekend, Jonella came in and helped Lux clean up.

  “I woulda painted it purple,” Jonella said while they rested.

  “Yeah, me too,” Lux agreed as she watched the muscles on Carlos’ back twitch and flex under his shirt.

  “Take your shirt off,” Jonella instructed him.

  “I ain’t that hot,” he replied.

  “Yeah, but we are,” Jonella laughed.

  He laughed like a gorilla grunt and dropped the sweaty T-shirt on Lux’s head.

  “Now the pants,” Jonella said.

  “No.”

  “Aw, come on, baby.”

  “I got work to do.”

  “So?”

  “I ain’t got no underwears on.”

  “Oh,” said Jonella.

  “Show’s over then?” asked Lux.

  “Yeah, he don’t wanna get no paint on his dick.”

  “I don’t blame him.”

  “Fuck off the both of you crazy sluts trying to get into my pants.”

  He pushed the roller up the wall, covering over all the dirt and stains, leaving a blank canvas for some tenant to make their own.

  “How’s work?” Jonella asked as she scrubbed out the sink.

  “Sucks,” Lux said, wiping down the refrigerator. “How’s motherhood?”

  “Sucks,” Jonella reported, “but the baby’s good. Carlos went back living with his mom which is ok, cuz, GOD, is he an asshole, or what?”

  “Oh yeah, Carlos is an asshole.”

  They laughed and Jonella punched Lux in the shoulder in a friendly fashion that would leave a bruise.

  “When you gonna have one?”

  “Baby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah, not me.”

  “I’m gonna have another one.”

  “You pregnant again?”

  “Nah, just planning.”

  “With Carlos.”

  “Carlos the Asshole? No way.”

  “With who then?”

  “Someone I ain’t met yet.”

  “What’s Carlos gonna say to that?” Lux asked and, by way of reminder, held up her own mangled little pinky finger, four years healed but still looking kind of bent and broken.

  “Carlos loves the kid, but he don’t want to love no more babies cuz ah the money. So when I get pregnant I’ll let him think it’s his until he’s ready to piss his pants and when it turns out to be not, he’ll have a fucking celebration and fall down and kiss my big ass.”

  The plan seemed reasonable to Lux. Still she feared for her friend.

  “What if it goes different and he gets mad?”

  “It won’t.”

  Carlos wasn’t so tall, but he was very strong and wiry. He didn’t have much that you could take from him. He was as comfortable in jail as he was in Queens. There was no civilization, no restraining order to hold him back once he got it in his head to make something happen. In the tenth grade Lux had been his best girl and Jonella had been his second-choice girl. He kept his harem in line with punches and slaps, but only once had he broken a bone, the little bones in Lux’s pinky. He twisted it until it fractured.

  Soon after she graduated from hi
gh school, Joseph, Lux’s biggest brother, was also released from prison. After inspecting his baby sister’s crippled little finger, Joseph invited Carlos over to the house and informed Carlos that Lux was now free to do what she liked. There had been lots of shouting, hitting, and blood, most of it falling out of Carlos’ head. Although the fighting went on for a long time, Carlos and Joseph were friends, so it ended fairly amiably.

  “Yeah, well fuck you then,” Carlos had shouted.

  “Yeah, fuck you too,” Joseph shouted back. “And don’t forget I need a ride tomorrow.”

  “Yeah right. I’ll be there.”

  “You better.”

  Joseph let the screen door slam behind him as he walked back into the house. Lux was sitting at the kitchen table, her palms pressed close to her ears. She had been listening to the rumbled ocean sounds echoing in her head from the pressure of her hand, drowning out the crunching sounds that she knew were either Carlos hitting her brother or Joseph hitting her lover. Joseph smiled at her, sitting there at the kitchen table looking like a frightened mouse. He pushed his finger into the new bruise on Lux’s cheek and said, “He ain’t gonna fuck wit you no more.” Then he sat down on the couch to drink beer with their mother. With Lux out of the picture, Jonella had Carlos all to herself.

  “I think next time I want to have a girl,” Jonella was musing, a funny smile caught in the corner of her mouth.

  “You don’t have any money,” Lux reminded her.

  “So?”

  Lux didn’t say anything.

  “Money comes,” Jonella continued smiling as she thought about the full and good way pregnancy made her feel and the sweet, wet smell of her baby’s skin. She wasn’t going to be stupid and have six or eight babies like some of the girls she knew. But one, or maybe even two more wouldn’t make much difference in her mother’s house.

  “We ain’t never gonna be rich, so why not have what I want,” Jonella announced.

  Jonella surveyed the kitchen. The parts she’d worked on were sparkling clean; other parts weren’t so good. Jonella redid the work Lux had attempted.

  “Good thing you’re doinking that rich guy. You’d never keep a job in the real world.”

  Lux excused herself to the living room where she rolled up the tarps and pulled the painter’s tape. When the last of the work debris was cleaned up, the apartment suddenly transformed into something real. Lux’s future.

  Jonella swept the floor, telling Lux about this old friend or describing something the baby did, who got fat, who got troubles. By the time they got to the bedroom, the old friends had run out of things to say. The two women sat on the radiator, watching their ex-lover roll paint onto the walls.

  Carlos was a good, clean painter. He’d never have done it—not for all the money in the world—if he knew the apartment was Lux’s. If he found out he’d probably track her down and break her other fingers. It was unlikely he would ever discover that Lux owned the property because Auntie Who-ah’s almost-dead attorney had set up an S corporation to avoid paying income tax. Her new apartment was in the name of a company she had dubbed “Trevor Holdings.” The only way Carlos would know she was the real owner is if she told him.

  Carlos finished the last stroke of clean beige paint. He carefully laid the roller down on a piece of newspaper and stepped back to consider his work. Pleased, he unbuttoned his pants, turned to the women, and stepped naked out of the pants.

  “Ok, now I’m ready,” he said.

  The girls’ giggles were throaty and not at all highpitched.

  There were hard, raised red keloid scars across Carlos’ arms and torso, some accidental, some intentional. On his bicep was a tattoo, well-drawn and executed with extreme detail, depicting a rooster hanging dead by a noose. Carlos, who was not completely lacking in humor, liked to rub his hand over the tattoo and tell people he had a well-hung cock. His body was rock hard and one time, on a hot day, Lux had kissed him while he was eating a peach. That was the kiss that stayed with her, the sweet taste of fresh fruit mixed with his lips and sweat, the kiss that came back to her when he stood there laughing at them, daring Jonella and Lux to come get it.

  Jonella jumped and Carlos caught her. They had no doubt that sex was good and bodies were fun. Lux held back.

  “Wassup, baby?”

  “It’s you, Carlos, she don’t like you no more.”

  “No I think it’s you, cause you got fat or maybe she done gave up the dyke.”

  The rhythm was coming from within and Lux watched as Jonella and Carlos danced it into each other.

  “Girl, don’t listen to him, you ain’t fat at all,” Lux called by way of encouragement when Jonella dropped her overalls. Jonella, her lips lingering on Carlos’ nipple on their way to his crotch, waved at Lux, her fingers beckoning, arm dancing like an entranced cobra to a sweet beat.

  I’ll come up behind her and rub my breasts on her back until she goes down on him and then I’ll have Carlos’ hands and mouth all to myself until she mounts him. Lux was choreographing in her head. In front of her Jonella had already pressed Carlos to the floor and was pushing herself on top of him. Lux’s entry ramp was coming up soon. She had to jump off the radiator fast or she was gonna miss it. When Carlos flips her over and comes at her from behind, Lux planned, then I’ll come up and just shove my boobs in his face. Lux stood up and the moaning started.

  “Baby, baby, baby. Oh baby. Yeah baby.”

  “Oh bayyybe.”

  “Mmmmbaby”

  The ship was sailing on without her but Lux still couldn’t move. Lux, hanging between two worlds, watched Carlos’ golden back turn shiny with sweat, and joy turn Jonella’s face beautiful. Her head fell back and twisted as Jonella started to lick the air like she was looking for something to roll around in her mouth. Lux thought of that peach-sweetened kiss.

  Lux watched her friend’s face change from thoughtful to blissful and back again. It was as if she was in turn wowed by a terribly deep thought and a moment later, conversing with God, then back to a math problem, then pure religion, then complex geometry as her brow furrowed and relaxed in shorter and shorter cycles each rising in intensity. Math/God; Math/God; Math/God. And as Carlos pumped her harder and harder: God, God, God, God.

  Lux knew Carlos, out of a desire to control and not out of generosity, would make sure Jonella came first. The things that made him an amazing lover were the same things that made him a terrifying boyfriend. Carlos took deep pleasure in controlling women.

  “No, no no nononon.”

  Jonella always denied the pleasure at first. Carlos loved that about her. She tried to escape the wave. It was too big, it was too much, but Carlos chased her, flicking his thumbs over her breasts, sucking on the nipples. Between denial and acceptance came confusion.

  “No baby, yes yes baybee no! oh no!”

  Carlos looked up for a moment and saw Lux, clinging to the radiator, her mouth slightly slack and one hand wrapped around her own breast. He winked at her.

  When they were finished, Lux knew, when the room came back into focus and the buttons that connected them came undone, they were going to ask her questions about why and make fun of her for watching them. Carlos would assume she was waiting for him, waiting to have him all to herself like old times. It was in his wink. He told her he was saving something just for her.

  Lux slid off the radiator. She clicked the locks and ran all the way to the subway. She arrived at Trevor’s apartment breathing hard. She found him sitting on the couch in his bathrobe, talking on the phone. She immediately ruined his plans to catch a movie with an old friend.

  13. Standing Naked on the Rabbi’s Toilet Bowl

  MARGOT KNEW HER DRESS for the wedding had to be perfect. And turquoise. Margot looked great in turquoise. In the end she found a slinky sheath, cut on the bias to drape in that amazing way that bias-cut fabric drapes. Spaghetti straps and clingy fabric would require the perfect underwear, which was really a girdle, though the salesgirl called it Supportive Panties.<
br />
  “It keeps you all tucked in,” the salesgirl at Macy’s told her. Margot judged the girl to be about twenty-three years old and two hundred and thirty pounds.

  “I’m wearing one now,” the girl announced proudly. “Takes a good ten pounds off my hips.”

  “Oh,” Margot said, finally filling the space left open after such a remark, “good for you.”

  Margot bought the girdle in spite of the shocking sales pitch. On the evening of the wedding she tried to slip into it after the shower but found that the latex fabric would not slide up if her skin were even the slightest bit damp. That was all right. There were other things to do.

  Margot put on her makeup and shoes and was doing her hair when the phone rang.

  “What are you wearing?” Brooke asked.

  “Right now just my shoes,” Margot told her.

  “Hmm, you’ll be cold tonight in the air-conditioning.”

  They laughed.

  “Do you know what Lux is wearing?” Margot asked.

  “Haven’t talked to her since the hair pulling debacle in the writers’ group,” Brooke said. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be startling.”

  More laughter as they concocted possible Lux combinations in fuchsia and purple with bits and bobs of cheap, fake jewelry. Margot, sitting naked on her living room couch waiting for her nails to dry, drew a scene for Brooke’s amusement that featured Lux, at this very moment also getting ready for Trevor’s son’s wedding, hair dryer in one hand and a can of extra-glue hair spray in the other.

  Margot planned to stand next to Lux as often as possible. She planned to speak wittily and clearly and jut out her hip at seductive angles while her bold yet tasteful turquoise dress promised a sensual body beneath. Trevor didn’t have to know anything about the girdle.

  Makeup applied, hair coiffed, nails done, shoes on— there was nothing left to do but get the girdle on.